Hola Papa! Pope Francis' tweets are a hit en Espanol

Mar. 19, 2013
|

Spanish fans of Pope Francis such as this nun shown Sunday outside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires have driven his Twitter following up at a rate of 100,000 new followers a day in Spanish alone. / Mario Tama, Getty Images

by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Pope Francis is a multilingual star on Twitter with new followers piling in at 200,000 a day -- half of them tweeting in Spanish.

By noon Monday, the Argentine-born pope neared 3.8 million followers among the nine languages of his @pontifex handle. This includes more than 2 million in English and nearly another million at @pontifex_es, the Spanish language version.

Francis could surpass 4 million followers by the end of the installation Mass on Tuesday, when the pope's homily will be broadcast globally and tweeted with a frenzy.

"It's a global church, and the Twitter followers are starting to reflect that. Clearly we expect to see a bit of a jump with Pope Francis, and not only in Spanish," Vatican communications strategist Greg Burke, said Monday.

Even so, Burke said, "I can't wait until @pontifex in Spanish passes up the English. Latin America is where we have to get the message out, and Pope Francis can do that."

Spain's Cervantes Institute finds Spanish is already the second-most-used language on Twitter, after English, although more than 60% of Latin Americans are still not on the Web, according to a January report by Fox News Latino.

The @pontifex sites on Twitter, launched in mid-December, were cleared of Pope Benedict XVI's tweets the hour he retired on February 28.

But it roared back to life last week with the posting of "HABEMUS PAPAM FRANCISCUM" when Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope and chose the name Francis. That day, tweets about the new pope hit Super Bowl and Oscar heights -- 130 tweets per minute.

By Sunday, @pontifex reset -- taking down the initial announcement and shifting to a more personal voice with what now counts as Pope Francis's first tweet, a line from his blessing: "Dear friends, I thank you from my heart and I ask you to continue to pray for me. Pope Francis."

Within 24 hours, it had 31,346 retweets in English and another 30,532 in Spanish.